It’s Interconnect next week, the first outing for IBM’s new conference consolidating its Cloud, Mobile, DevOps and Security businesses. It will be good to find out more about the recent reorganisation at the company, and to catch up with clients. Is IBM really all in for cloud? I should know more in a week.

I am giving a couple of talks, and really looking forward to both.

Monday morning will be the first outing for a piece of work I am doing looking at tech events and Developer Engagement. I will explain why corporations should encourage their technical staff to get out from behind their laptops and start going to developer events. We will look at the advantages of hosting events, going to events, and generally getting out there from an engineering perspective. Companies from all sectors are realising that they won’t get through the transition to the digital economy without getting the best out of the best software engineers and developers. So what can the enterprise learn from Web companies about developer culture, and how to channel it?

Monday, February 23, 2015

11:am-11:30am

@dev playground

My second session of the day examines a completely different topic – Mobile, Moats, Mainframes and Data Management. Today we’re seeing the rise of the unicorn – mobile app companies valued in the multibillion dollar range. These sky-high evaluations are not based on revenues from the mobile app itself, so much as the data being collected about how users are interacting with the network. I will examine how enterprises can benefit from similar approaches, and begin to establish their own data moats and drawbridges. Companies need to take a broad view of data assets and the transactions that underpin them, in order to compete with new highly capitalised competitors. I will be presenting with IBM’s Michael Perera again. We do a pretty good double act. You should come check us out.

Over the years we have been asked many times to run more events in the US. One of the reasons we haven’t done more events in the USA is that it’s hard work to run events outside your home city, without a local network in place, and we can’t do everything in Portland, Maine. So when 2lemetry volunteered to help host Thingmonk in Colorado we thought why not go for it?

So we’re bringing RedMonk’s unique blend of story-telling and craft experiences to Denver, at Mile High Spirits and Tasting lounge on March 3rd and 4th. You can expect fantastic speakers, and great food and drink experiences. It’s not every IoT conference that will have a URLs for the sensors in a hog roast, for example, or a beacon-driven pub crawl, taking in some of Denver’s best pints.

We try to bridge different communities, rather than having a constant stream of talks that represent essentially the same viewpoint.

Speakers include

Alexandros Marinos, founder Resin.io,

Building a SONOS Clone in 5 Minutes, a live coding demo.

Josh Dzeilak, open sorceror at Keen.io,

I Connect, Therefore I Am – A Philosophy of Things

Kelsey Breseman, Engineer & Director of Community at Technical Machines

Stories from a Connected World

Josh Holmes, architect evangelist, Microsoft

Connected Car: from devices to data to knowledge

Doctor Sarah Cooper, VP bus dev M2Mi

Rise of the Machines: on data and IoT comms

Sam Phippen, founder Fun and Plausible

The Most Dangerous Game: Giving 16-Year-Olds Power Tools

Day One will be a hackday, where we join up all the things, and have fun playing with fantastic, easy to use Tessel devices.

Day Two will be talks – we aim for short punchy stuff that goes META.

If you’re interested in attending, you should probably ping [email protected] (he has some awesome discount codes). If you’d like to make a corporate company purchase, please email me jgovernor at redmonk.com and i’d be happy to work something out. This event is a great learning and networking opportunity for companies interested in developer-led adoption for IoT apps, services and solutions.

Monki Gras is a labour of love. I personally select every talk and speaker, and sign off on every detail, from schwag to food to design. It is not conference by committee, which makes the event a bit scary to organise, but incredibly rewarding. With my theme this year – the inexorable rise of Nordic influences on craft and digital culture and software development – I feel I helped to uncover something people know intuitively, but haven’t yet given a name.

Also, apparently, I stuck to my theme. Laura Cowen says: “All the speakers this year were Scandinavian in some way. It was probably the most rigorously applied conference theme I’ve ever seen (mostly, conferences come up with a ‘theme’ for marketing purposes which usually gets mostly forgotten about by the time of the conference itself).” You should read the whole post.

David Gingell also has a fairly comprehensive write up here, which you should also check out.

Helena Bengtsson, Editor of Data Projects at The Guardian newspaper, told us about her adventures in data-driven journalism. That is, the seemingly simple task of using a tiny bit of coding and data analysis to mine the world for stories. In particular, Helena was interested in looking into various government activities, for example, seeing how often each lobbyist visited government officials.

Each of the data-driven investigations quickly turned into a sort of cat-and-mouse game where the Helena would find a piece of interesting data and then the government would slightly change how that data was made available in order to, one presumes, add just enough chaff to the system to make Helena’s task more difficult. For example, Helena asked for a dump of all lobbyist visits and received a very tidy CSV file for the past 30 days. As she asked for more complete updates, the government changed its reporting mechanism to just be daily snap-shots, expiring any data older than 24 hours. So, being tenacious, Helena simply asked for these snap-shots daily. There were other nightmarish ETL tales like having to handle PDFs and other ill-formatted data.

Day One in particular felt just right – dare i say lagom. Day Two of course we all had a hangover, so things were not quite crisp like crispbread [Swedish: knäckebröd, hårt bröd, hårdbröd, spisbröd, knäcke, Danish: knækbrød, Norwegian: knekkebrød, Finnish: näkkileipä, Icelandic: hrökkbrauð], but talks were a little more technical.

The conference kicked off with a wonderful talk by the Söderhavet digital agency about its rebranding work for Sweden, creating a new brand and visual identity for all official communications by the country. The Guardian has a nice write up of the project, here. Next up was Linda Sandvik, now working at the Guardian, on ‘Fjellvettreglene: The Norwegian Mountain Code’, with comments on everything from Slow TV to the Quota Law (today companies must legally have at least 40% board level representation by women). Regarding the Mountain Code Linda helped us all understand something that every Norwegian kid knows – sometimes it is right to quit, because you can’t beat weather. We should celebrate Frijtof Nansen rather that Robert Falcon Scott.

These two talks set the tone for the conference. We learned about culture, technology and language. We learned that the Nordic countries, let alone Scandinavian ones, are not a singleton. One of the particular pleasures of Monki Gras me learning more about how the different nations in the region see each other, and view themselves.

I want to thank all my amazing speakers. Helena Bengtsson, Editor of Data Projects at The Guardian newspaper, Donnie Berkholz, Senior Analyst at RedMonk, Per Bueris the CTO of Varnish Software and became an avid home-brewer after Monki Gras 2014. Emil Eifrem, founder of Neo Technology (Neo4j), Martin Elwin, head of Solutions Architecture, Nordics, for Amazon Web Services, Michael Friis, Product Manager at Heroku, Niklas Gustavsson is a backend engineer at Spotify, Reetta Heiskanen is Communications Lead at Mehackit, Janne Heino, Solution Designer of Cloud at Nokia Siemens. Co-presenting with Janne Heino, Chris Grzegorczyk is a Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard, Chief Architect of Helion Eucalyptus, Anke Holst, Janne Kalliola, founder and CEO of Exove, Viktor Klang is the Chief Architect at Typesafe Inc. Marietta Le, investigative journalist on the Hungarian website Atlatszo.hu. Elina Lepomäki, Member of The Finnish Parliament, representing the center-right National Coalition Party, Joonas Lehtinen is the founder and CEO of Vaadin, Andreas Olofsson, CEO at Adapteva, will discuss ‘Designing Hardware the Nordic Way.’ How does the Nordic landscape and environment impact its peoples viewpoints on life, structure, design, and even hardware? We all know IKEA furniture – its simplistic, clean lines are instantly recognisable. Is Nordic hardware designed to a similar brief design, and if so, how does this impact its usability and effectivenesss? Andreas will give us an overview of designing the Nordic way, Patrik Sallner, CEO of MariaDB (formerly SkySQL), Linda Sandvik is a creative technologist and Knight-Mozilla Fellow at The Guardian, Ilja Summala, CTO at Nordcloud. From Söderhavet, Creative Director Mattias Svensson and Jesper Robinell, Head of Design. Stefan Hattenbach, Type Designer and founder of MAC Rhino Fonts. And Saffron Governor, catering consultant.

Techworld has a solid write up of the Niklas Gustavsson talk on Spotify Developer culture.

“Spotify’s success is largely down to the way it gets developers to work in small groups on autonomous engineering projects, according to one of the company’s project leaders.”

We didn’t achieve 40% participation by women, but I think we did sort of OK on gender diversity. On racial diversity, not so much.

While I had sign off on every detail, that is not to say I didn’t have a great curatorial team working with me. Christie Fidura made sure the trains ran on time. Helgi Gudjonsson pulled together an outstanding range of craft beers and aquavits, and my sister Saffron Governor managed all the catering, putting together an incredible menu which included elk salami, reindeer mouse and air-dried pickled wood-ear mushrooms. My colleagues at Shoreditch Works managed logistics for me. As ever Ben Gatehouse managed design.

If you like the sound of Monki Gras you should check out Thingmonk USA in Denver in a couple of weeks. We’ll have amazing talks and hacks, an IoT connected Hog Roast, and a beacon-driven pub crawl.

I have been running Monki Gras, a single track intimate event with epic food and craft brewing experiences for four years now. The theme for 2015 is Nordic Craft Culture and Tech. The speakers are going to be incredible. For example we have the Söderhavet team that recently created a new national brand identity for Sweden – see the Sweden Sans font above, in the playful logo redesign. But as with all RedMonk events the attendees are also an incredibly talented, vibrant bunch. Everyone comes to learn and play.

Monki Gras is a meta conference. It’s about culture, craft, language, design, code and getting things done. As I plan for this year my thoughts keep going back to the inaugural Monktoberfest in 2011 – Zack Urlocker gave a fantastic talk about how to effectively manage remote teams. He reprised the talk at the first Monki Gras. Given Zack’s background, helping to scale MySQL, he gave us some wonderful insights into Nordic software development culture.

When you look at the list of technologies that originated in the Nordics it becomes clear that collaboration and distributed development are central – from Linux to GIT to SSH, technology is needed to underpin effectiveness. You can’t rely on San Francisco meetups to establish the “right way“. Long dark winters make for good code, but also collaboration through code. If i am right that Open Source invented Social networking – Why Open Source software is Social Media – then that means the Nordics invented online social networking as well.

So what about open source and money? One interesting tension is that Nordics and Scandinavians know the monetary value of work – you have to make a living, don’t ask someone to do something for free – but made open source what it is today- commercial and successful. Freedom doesn’t have to mean free as in beer, but i can.

So what set off my thinking? The basic idea is pretty straightforward and was inspired by… Radio One. As I explain on the Monki Gras blog:

After two years in a row where the theme was obvious to me early on- Scaling Craft (2013), followed by Sharing Craft (2014) I was floundering for a guiding curatorial line this time around. So I get home one evening and my wife is listening to Radio 1 (I know, I know, we listen to Radio 6 as well!) the show is about the Scandinavian Invasion, with a new wave of Scandinavian pop artists, writers and producing breaking through. To be honest I didn’t really notice any of the music as soon as the presenter mentioned Spotify.

Neurons started firing. My first thought? London is not very good at scaling companies. Too many London startups sell too early. Stockholm on the other hand has an incredible track record of taking companies further – Skype, Kazaa, Spotify, etc. Of course gifted individuals play a role – Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis are an incredible team. But a culture spawned these individuals, and my neurons kept firing and I knew I had a potentially incredible conference on my hands.

Noma in Copenhagen is currently the best restaurant in the world, with its minimalism and focus on foraged, local ingredients. The Mikkeller Bar in Copenhagen was one of the sparks that reignited craft brewing excellence across Europe – and is now crushing it in San Francisco. Mikkel Borg Bjergsø, with his peripatetic “gypsy brewing” style is all about excellence in collaboration and brewing high wire acts.

Gypsy brewing. Sharing Recipes. Making it easy to recombine things and collaborate. Beer suddenly feels like software. The Web runs on Nordic inventions. 3 Letters out of 4 in LAMP stack. Not bad considering Silicon Valley considers itself to be the place that provides infrastructure for the rest of the world.

What makes Nordic Culture so productive? Education is clearly fantastic in the region, and the winters are long and cold, perfect for heads down coding.

Design and lighting are both very important in Scandinavian culture too. This all comes together. Code, design, liberal social values, education, great taste, modesty, skill, practice. This conference is going to explore all of these themes, and it’s going to rock.

The Speaker list is really solid so far.

Per Buer is the CTO of Varnish Software and became an avid home-brewer after Monki Gras 2014. In addition to crafting his excellent beer, he’s an expert at starting his own business. In Per’s presentation, ‘Fighting with Polar Bears and Other Challenges You Encounter When Running a Startup In Norway’, he will share his experience with running a commercial company that has an open source product at its core.

Linda Sandvik is a creative technologist and Knight-Mozilla Fellow at The Guardian. She describes herself as a wannabe MacGyver and rebel. In her talk, ‘The Norwegian Mountain Code’, Linda will examine Norwegian culture as it is exposed in the code. You can expect comments on everything from slow TV to the Norwegian Quota Law.

Janne Kalliola is the founder and CEO of Exove, a services company using open technologies to improve customers’ business in the Nordic countries and Baltic states. Janne will be teaching us the Finnish word ‘talkoot‘ in his presentation ‘Making Meaning By Contributing to Improve the Quality of Your Life,’ as he emphasises the benefits of working together to achieve a common goal by being an active member in the local community.

Jason Hoffman, head of cloud at Ericsson, will be giving us a Lilyhammer view of his first few months in Sweden after leaving San Francisco.

Patrick Sallner, CEO MariaDB on Collaboration and Nordic Development Culture.

Stefan Hattenbach, founder MAC Rhino Fonts and Jesper Robinell, Soderhavet on the thinking and process behind creating a new official national typeface – Sweden Sans, otherwise known as Lagom, “just enough” in English.

Ilja Summala, CTO, Nordcloud on Finnish Craftsmanship and the Cloud – Cloudcraft, Maslow (of course), How craftsmanship and open source in Finland tie up with setting up new housing for 10% of population post WWII. Docker and microservices as anti-devops craft movement.

Our very own Donnie Berkholz will be talking about how tech culture in the US midwest is influenced by settler’s Scandinavian roots.

Turns out that running four conferences in as many months is hard. Really hard. What with IOT@Scale with SAP, Thingmonk, The Business of IoT, and next Monki Gras I have had my hands full. Without Fintan Ryan helping me pull things together I could not have managed. Throw in Christmas, and as ever I am delinquent in posting.

The second Thingmonk was a blast. People really enjoyed the program. I wanted to run a conference “for IOT people looking at development, design and data to get stuck in with the programmers, designers and visionaries that are making the Internet of Things.” and I feel I did pretty well there.

We had amazing talks from a wide range of speakers, some alumni, some new additions to the RedMonk community.

It’s impossible to put on a conference with great food, drinks and logistics unless you have great sponsors. In this regard we were very very lucky at ThingMonk. So massive thanks to Salesforce, 2lemetry, Eclipse Foundation, Aviva Insurance, IBM, ThingWorx, and SAP. For the hackday, APIs were wrangled and we got SAP, IBM and Salesforce talking to each other, and to Adam Gunther’s Hoff styled leather jacket. Oh yeah – IBM even brought a connected car to hack. Espruino, Tessel, and resin.io all played a starring role.

Truth is it is very early days in the Internet of Things. This isn’t the end, or the beginning of the end, but it may be just be the end of the beginning. Standards, the role of data, open source, open hardware, programming models, business models are all in flux. Who knows – Uber may yet become the biggest IoT player on the planet, once it delivers flying cars, though I personally am going long on IFTTT. Suffice to say, there is plenty more to share and learn and work together on. That’s why we’re now planning Thingmonk in North America.

But first, at the end of this month, comes Monki Gras, for the fourth time. We’re taking a different cut this time around. I have done Social Craft, Scaling Craft and Sharing Craft, but was running out of runway with “S”s. instead this year I am looking at Nordic culture, and how it has been massively influential in powering the Internet – from IRC to SSH to Linux to MySQL to PHP to Varnish to C# to GIT. If you want to know How To Do Things Right in Software Development then check out the Nordics- Silicon Valley is just one center of gravity for the Web buildout. Then consider the businesses such as – Skype, Spotify, Rovio, and SuperCell, all epic market leaders.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Read my next post to find out more about why you should get involved with Monki Gras 2015 – either as an attendee, sponsor or both.

A foreign language has been creeping into many of the presentations I hear and the memos I read. It adds nothing to a message but noise, and I want your help in stamping it out. It’s called gobbledygook. There’s no shortage of examples. Nothing seems to get finished anymore it gets “finalized.” Things don’t happen at the same time but “coincident with this action.” Believe it or not, people will talk about taking a “commitment position” and then because of the “volatility of schedule changes” they will “decommit” so that our “posture vis-à-vis some data base that needs a sizing will be able to enhance competitive positions.” That’s gobbledygook.

Thingmonk is a one track, intimate, developer conference for the Internet of Things. It will have a connected car and leather jacket to program, solid tech talks on big data and messaging (2lemetry are going deep on MQTT futures). Day One is a non competitive hackday, a chance to hack with like minds on cool APIs and devices such as the Tessel (super easy Javascript with a modular hardware architecture). Salesforce’s Reid Carlberg will also bring a bunch of cool hardware to play with, including a bunch of wearables.

Day Two is technical talks, from folks like Yodit Stanton, founder of opensensors.io, and Alexandros Marinos, founder of resin.io, and for the Hadoop fans amongst you we’re excited to have Michael Hausenblas Chief Data Engineer from MapR talking about big data for IoT.

This year, we’re also tacking into the corporate agenda with an extra day of talks and networking about digital transformation driven by the sensor, automation and Big data revolution under the moniker Business of IoT. Aviva, the insurance giant will explain how IoT is going to fundamentally change the insurance industry, and thus society. Simon Wardley of the Leading Edge Forum is one of tech’s most engaging speakers- you can expect a cast of thousands of slides, and not a few ducks.

As with all RedMonk events expect delicious food and the very best in craft beverages.

For more information please see Thingmonk and The Business of IoT. For a ticket to both register through Thingmonk. There are also some discount codes flying around – I leave it to you, dear reader, to snuffle them out.

ThingMonk is a meeting of the tribes for the Internet of Things in Shoreditch, London on December 2nd and 3rd, for people interested in application development, design and big data in the coming world of sensors, automation, and massive digital transformation. Come and meet the software developers, designers and entrepreneurs building this new world. Day one will be a hackday with a connected car on site, and some leather wearables in the shape of a programmable David Hasselhoff jacket. Day two will be talks about the technologies and methods for building IoT services, including talks from Yodit Stanton, founder and CEO of opensensors.io, and Tamara Giltsoff, VP of Business Development at Product Health. We also have Reid Carlberg, the inspector gadget of IoT, and he will have the biggest suitcase of devices and wearables you have ever seen with him.

On December 4th ThingMonk joins up with The Business of IoT, to look at business models, data and scaling IoT businesses – that is, ThingMonk in a Suit. We will have Aviva talking about how IoT will redefine the insurance industry, and great talks on business mapping and digital transformation.

Never knowingly under-ambitious I decided to build on the success of Thingmonk last year, but adding another day, dedicated to business issues and industry transformations led by the sensor/Big Data/automation IoT revolution.

So now we have a hackday, followed by a day of technical talks, followed by a day of talks for people that normally wear suits. No wonder organisations like 2lemetry, Salesforce and the Eclipse Foundation have come in as sponsors.

But if you prefer more geeky vibe, Thingmonk at the same venue December 2, 3 will look at data, design and developers, and how they’re going to drive the internet of things revolution. We will have learn an IoT hackday, with a connected car to hack parked out front, provided by IBM, and a Net-connected David Hasselhoff leather jacket (this is true, i will be programmable, and channeling my inner Hoff). Sadly we couldn’t combine the two and get Kitt from Knight Rider to come along, but then you can’t have anything. We’re also going to feature the lovely new Tessel pluggable devices, programmable in Javascript; they’re super easy to set up and

I recently had a jam-packed week in San Francisco, attending Dreamforce and running IOT at Scale.

For the one or two of you that weren’t actually at Dreamforce, it’s kind of hard to sum up a conference with so much stuff going on. With that in mind it’s probably best not to try.

I will however say that the Internet of Things space in the Developer Zone was really solid. Salesforce doesn’t do things by halves, and IoT Pied Piper Reid Carlberg nailed it again. Salesforce is doubling down on wearables, which I think is pretty smart, given that at least two industries – healthcare and insurance – are going to be utterly transformed by people wearing little devices that monitor their behaviours. The old mantra you can’t manage what you can’t measure is coming to a human body near you. Everything from heart rate to blood sugar level to amount of exercise taken is going to be used by insurers and healthcare professionals in making decisions. Whether or not you see this vision as dystopic or utopic it is coming and coming soon. Here is Amanda Mackenzie, CMO of Aviva, talking about the revolution.

The technology exists to guide dietary choices and identify environmental risks to health, too. Spectrometers that scan food, walls or carpets for allergens will help relieve suffering among those with particular sensitivities, but also have the potential to help everyone keep a check on what they’re putting in their bodies. Again, insurers can track positive behaviour and reward it. Far more importantly, so too can doctors.

But one of the most interesting demos in the IoT section was from eBest, a Retail mobile services company. The demo involved putting a phone into a vending machine, using the onboard camera to track merchandising – ensuring for example that a Coca Cola supplied drink cooler in a retailer was only full of Coca-Cola Company beverages rather than competitor offerings. The app could also use image recognition to potentially ensure all drinks are properly facing forward and so on. Beyond the business implications I was struck by the development approach – the transactional services were running on Force.com, with the the image recognition on Heroku. Hai micro-services!

If I am really honest, what most excited me seems to have been a misunderstanding. The eBest rep said that “Coke had bought eBest” so I was taken aback. Wow Coca Cola now has a software-based retail services arm. Software is drinking the world, indeed. Sadly a Google search indicates that this idea was indeed a misunderstanding – Coke did not in fact like the solution so much it bought the company.

The example outlined above however does show a world beyond wearables with a very clear business case, bridging traditional enterprise transaction services with image recognition running on a PaaS. If I was Salesforce this is exactly the kind of example I would encourage, bridging as it does the Force.com and Heroku worlds. If you’re a traditional ERP company customer on the other hand, this kind of deployment would be a significant structural challenge.